Open Innovation to Help Predict Natural Disasters
Meteorologists and weather forecasters all make valiant efforts to forecast the weather. Sometimes they are spot on and other times you might as well look at a piece of seaweed to find out what’s going on in the atmosphere.
But perhaps the days of hit and miss weather forecasts will soon be a thing of the past, because the Planetary Skin Institute (PSI), a non-profit research and development organisation and Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation (MCTI) are using open innovation to predict climatic patterns. The aim is not so you and I can know whether to pack a brolly when we head out, but the far more serious and valuable objective of developing natural disaster early warning system capabilities for Brazil.
What has prompted this initiative are the extreme weather conditions and natural disasters that can pound Brazil and more generally the developing world. In fact Brazil is the country with the largest number of people affected by natural disasters in the Americas. However, currently there isn’t an effective early warning system which means by the time government agencies get round to act it is already too late or many people.
This multi-year collaborative program will also involve leading national and international R&D partners with support from a Technical Cooperation agreement between CAF – Development Bank of Latin America – and PSI to speed up the development of the system.
“We are proud to catalyze Brazil’s MCTI-PSI open innovation program on early warning systems for natural disasters, as we consider this new information infrastructure critical for informed risk management of our shareholder country governments in Latin America and beyond,” said Enrique Garcia, President of CAF – Development Bank of Latin America.
“We look forward to partnering with MCTI, PSI and key Latin American governments to replicate and scale the capabilities of the Brazilian early warning system to the region as a whole in the future.”
Natural disasters cannot be prevented, but their effects can be minimized with early detection. If the open innovation project is successful the early warning detection system will be rolled out to other Latin American countries and eventually to the rest of the developing world.
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